March 8, 2012

On behalf of the special issue editors — Henry Chesbrough, Ammon Salter, Wim Vanhaverbeke and myself — I’m please to announce plans for a special issue of Research Policy entitled “Open Innovation: New Insights and Evidence.”

The special issue is intended to update research on open innovation a decade after Chesbrough’s original Open Innovation book. If everything goes well, the issue will be published in late 2013 after the reviews and revisions have been completed.

In addition, we are hosting a conference for papers intended for the special issue. It will be held in June at Imperial College London, squeezed between Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee and the Summer Olympics.

The full call for papers is at http://bit.ly/openinno2013 , and it includes a range of potential topics. We are looking for new ideas and incremental improvement, support for open innovation and criticism of it, and both theoretical and empirical insights.

We have already confirmed participation by a group of senior innovation scholars:

Bruno Cassiman

Alfonso Gambardella

John Hagedoorn

Joachim Henkel

Bart Leten

Keld Laursen

Frank Piller

Andrea Prencipe

Georg von Krogh

We are hoping for a small, intimate conference of perhaps 25 papers and slightly more participants. However, because of the RP approval cycle, the Olympics and our 2013 target date, we have a very tight schedule:

Conference submissions are due April 15. We would love to have a paper but (given the tight deadline) will also make acceptance decisions based on an abstract.

Journal papers are due August 31, and while participation in the conference is not a prerequisite, we plan to work with those papers identified through the conference process to help develop them further prior to the Aug. 31 deadline.

Additional details and submission requirements are at the call for papers. I’d be glad to answer any questions that people have, or feel free to contact any of the special issue editors.